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On the Sixth Day of Campaigning

1. Pia Christmas-Møller is BACK. Lars Barfoed is busy healing the wounds of the Conservative Party. Now we all wait for Hans Engell, Henning Dyremose, Erik Haunstrup-Clemmesen, Bent Holstein and John Christmas-Møller to rejoin the party. Still, Pia CM’s chances of making one of the most surprising of comebacks in Danish political history are limited, given KF’s bad performance in polls since early 2010 and the fact that she will be competing against Per Stig Møller.

2. Nine men and one woman (the panel leader) discussing … wait for it … economic policy in an empty sales hall. Somehow symbolic – and slightly odd.

3. The economic data were … hmmm … better than expected. But what do they mean? Problem #1 is that -0,1% and +0,1% in many ways is a technicality, problem #2 that quarterly growth figures have a nasty tendency to bob up and down if you look at them over a longer period. Everybody who knows the least about macro-economics will have learnt that fine-tuning economic policy is somewhere between extremely difficult and almost impossible. This doesn’t make economic stimulus policies wrong as such, but they are really difficult to get right if you don’t accept a room for mistakes and bad timing.

And: Another question is how the employment figures look. If voters see unemployment as the main problem and employment is still sluggish – or there is widespread fear of higher unemployment – the government has a problem.

4. If you are not talking about about the RV-KF “alliance”, you have been missing the funny part of the campaign so far. I do think, however, that media should treat the ideology behind the yearning for “broad agreements” more sceptically. There may be a blog-post brewing here.

5. Young women and old men. Usually, gender-conscious people complain about sexism as the force behind this combination in, say, TV. But: Why does the Red-Green Alliance excel in this combination? How about some old women and young men? At least the Social Liberals can come up with Marianne Jelved and Morten Østergaard. And despite all talk about her fashion faux-pases, Margrethe Vestager carries her grey hairs proudly.

6. Berlingske’s Barometer has a very safe “red” lead. But at the same time, the Social Democrats only manage to get an estimated 27,5% of the vote. In a historical comparison, this is still a bad result for the SocDems even if it would improve the party’s awful 2007 performance. Denmark still looks set for a system with two large, but not dominant (SocDem, Lib), parties, two – or perhaps three – medium-sized ones (SF, DF and perhaps RV) and a number of smaller parties (RV, KF, EL, LA)